Serviio

Long time Serviio user but first time in here because usually it jut works

I just got myself my first 4K TV but as my internet connection is only 11Mb it isn't fast enough to stream 4K content so I downloaded some 4K videos from youtube and was intending streaming them from my NAS. They weren't showing up on my renderer so I looked in the serviio.log file and saw this message:



I have Serviio running on a QNAP TS-251+ Intel 64 bit NAS. I've updated all the ffmpeg files I could find to version 5.0.1 including the one in the Serviio home directory but the error persists. I was able to use Handbrake to recode the file but that took 80 minutes for a 5 minute video so that's not a feasible solution going forward. So two questions; is it possible to get Serviio to index and play this file (file details below) or if not is there any quicker way to recode it so that it does index and play?

Thanks,
Steve

Your video is using the AV1 video codec. This is fairly new, and will likely become more common in the future. It's going to replace VC9 on YouTube, so more devices will need to support it. At this time, Serviio doesn't recognize AV1, so it cannot be transcoded. I checked in Bitbucket, and someone added a ticket a little over a month ago to add support for AV1 in a future version of Serviio. So far, the Serviio developer has not responded to the ticket, so I would not expect it to be added in the next version. I don't think there's any issue with FFMPEG (the transcoding engine used in Serviio) being able to do it.

As to transcoding them yourself faster, I can't say for certain it can be done any quicker. I too have noticed using Handbrake it taking a long time to convert video codecs. I did find this thread on another forum about using FFMPEG to convert them. It took them 2 hours to convert their video, but I have no idea how large the file was. They said it took 9 hours on a Mac Mini, so was absolutely faster than using some other tool. Hopefully you can see a similar improvement.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/378 ... 1-to-H-264

Thanks for the explanation. I haven't set Serviio up to do any transcoding so I was expecting it to send the file as is to the TV and let the TV handle it. I suppose Serviio needs to read the file to begin with to create a thumbnail image if nothing else?

When you install Serviio, it defaults to Transcoding on. Also, for each new device it detects, it attempts to assign a profile based on the information the device sends in the DLNA handshake. It doesn't always choose the best profile, but overall with most TVs it does pretty well. I wrote the Roku profiles, and I could never get Serviio to correctly identify the Roku device. I mostly blame Roku for not implementing the complete DLNA standard.

Yes, Serviio does need to read the content of the media and determine if it's a playable file. Using the AV1 codec, it might simply know recognize it's a playable video that your TV might support. As a test, you could change the profile assigned to your TV to the Generic profile. This does no transcoding for any device or file. Now, instead of looking under Titles or Movies, look under Folders and browse to the file location. Sometimes such files can still be seen (and perhaps played) from the Files browser when they don't appear elsewhere. But if Serviio truly believes it's not a media file (such as an ASCII text file for example), it's likely still not going to show up.

Any update on this, seeing that it's pretty much two years since the matter of support for AV1 codec was previously raised? Video files encoded with AV1 still don't appear and the logfile contains:



Serviio 2.3 running on Debian Bookworm.

According to the Serviio Bitbucket site (where all issues/upgrades are tracked) support for AC1 is supposed to be in version 2.4. That version is currently in beta testing. I have no AV1 test files, so I can't verify if it's working.